Sit back, relax and listen to the rant...
Let me tell you a bit about where I work...
The building is amazing, you would not believe a school could look like this. It is all beautiful marble floors, Grecian columns, and walls free of 'fuck off you teacher scum!' The people are lovely, will bend over backwards to moan about the children. They are also a bunch of incompetent arseholes! I have never encountered a bunch of more lazy, untrained, unqualified housewives in my life. Tim says that it is no wonder Bahrain is still third world when they all take a three months off over the summer and then go back to work for three weeks and then start doing half days for Ramadan.
I had my medical today. A thouroughly unpleasent experience. For some reason, inspite of everything else being segregated, including some restaurants, men and women are allowed to undress in front of each other, when they are at the doctors. So after a hugely humiliating experience with my fellow Muslim colleagues I return to work. I brace mysely for the fact that none of the cover work set will have been touched. I do not anticipate the state that my classroom is in. Books are left out. Chairs are over-turned. Pages from story books have been ripped. Two of my displays have been torn down from the boards. But, this is the best bit, someone has let a child see my mark book. The child has scribbled erraticly in black felt tip all over this terms marks. How would you even think that allowing a child anywhere near the mark book was ok?
Non of the teachers here are trained, one for example has never taught before in her life, she had never been inside a classroom before September (apart, obviously when she was a kid.) I spend most of my days wondering why these parents pay money for this. Most staff think that teaching is about making children copy off the board. One teacher even bit a child the other day for not doing his homework. Now I know i've thought about it, but I wouldn't do it. There is no work ethic here, so consequently people are too lazy to even sack people. If you fired half the people in the school it would run as normal.
Anyway, rant over. I do quite like my job as all of this incompetence makes me look like a super teacher. Am doing the inset on Sunday about lesson planning and one in a few weeks about teaching and learning. It really is ok, I finish at 2.30 (1.30 at the moment) and then I get to go swim. The kids are really nice, but again lack a sort of intrinsic motivation. Some blame the climate, I blame inshallah.
I miss you all so much, am really looking forward to seeing Moo and Jimbo next week, and thanks to the lack of work ethic I have the whole week off.
Just to let you know, it is a positively mild 36 here and tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy. This is the coldest it has been since I arrived, and I can really feel it, last night I contemplated putting a jacket on.
We are going to see a Syrian Sufi singer and a whirling Dervish over Eid. Actually thats another thing I can rant about. I can't eat or drink at work at the moment. These people do not seem to realise that whole empires crumble if they are not allowed regular cups of tea. Tim has allowed me my first over-priced-expat-homesickness-comforter, I have English breakfast tea tea leaves, and they are Twinnings. It ammuses me that in this time of fasting they Bahrainis spend four times as much money on meat than at any other time. They also, whilst remembering the poor spend 100BD (about 175 English pounds) on an Eid outfit, that they wear for one day. Am looking forward to celebrating the end of the month of abstanance though.
Lots of big kissess to you all...
XXX
The building is amazing, you would not believe a school could look like this. It is all beautiful marble floors, Grecian columns, and walls free of 'fuck off you teacher scum!' The people are lovely, will bend over backwards to moan about the children. They are also a bunch of incompetent arseholes! I have never encountered a bunch of more lazy, untrained, unqualified housewives in my life. Tim says that it is no wonder Bahrain is still third world when they all take a three months off over the summer and then go back to work for three weeks and then start doing half days for Ramadan.
I had my medical today. A thouroughly unpleasent experience. For some reason, inspite of everything else being segregated, including some restaurants, men and women are allowed to undress in front of each other, when they are at the doctors. So after a hugely humiliating experience with my fellow Muslim colleagues I return to work. I brace mysely for the fact that none of the cover work set will have been touched. I do not anticipate the state that my classroom is in. Books are left out. Chairs are over-turned. Pages from story books have been ripped. Two of my displays have been torn down from the boards. But, this is the best bit, someone has let a child see my mark book. The child has scribbled erraticly in black felt tip all over this terms marks. How would you even think that allowing a child anywhere near the mark book was ok?
Non of the teachers here are trained, one for example has never taught before in her life, she had never been inside a classroom before September (apart, obviously when she was a kid.) I spend most of my days wondering why these parents pay money for this. Most staff think that teaching is about making children copy off the board. One teacher even bit a child the other day for not doing his homework. Now I know i've thought about it, but I wouldn't do it. There is no work ethic here, so consequently people are too lazy to even sack people. If you fired half the people in the school it would run as normal.
Anyway, rant over. I do quite like my job as all of this incompetence makes me look like a super teacher. Am doing the inset on Sunday about lesson planning and one in a few weeks about teaching and learning. It really is ok, I finish at 2.30 (1.30 at the moment) and then I get to go swim. The kids are really nice, but again lack a sort of intrinsic motivation. Some blame the climate, I blame inshallah.
I miss you all so much, am really looking forward to seeing Moo and Jimbo next week, and thanks to the lack of work ethic I have the whole week off.
Just to let you know, it is a positively mild 36 here and tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy. This is the coldest it has been since I arrived, and I can really feel it, last night I contemplated putting a jacket on.
We are going to see a Syrian Sufi singer and a whirling Dervish over Eid. Actually thats another thing I can rant about. I can't eat or drink at work at the moment. These people do not seem to realise that whole empires crumble if they are not allowed regular cups of tea. Tim has allowed me my first over-priced-expat-homesickness-comforter, I have English breakfast tea tea leaves, and they are Twinnings. It ammuses me that in this time of fasting they Bahrainis spend four times as much money on meat than at any other time. They also, whilst remembering the poor spend 100BD (about 175 English pounds) on an Eid outfit, that they wear for one day. Am looking forward to celebrating the end of the month of abstanance though.
Lots of big kissess to you all...
XXX
posted by Tim Heidi Arthur Kofi X at 10:44 am
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